Эд Макбейн: Love, Dad

The second weekend posed some problems.

The Crofts had made plans as long ago as the beginning of January, when the show opened, to go see Hadrian VII with Jeff and Junie Landers. They’d bought the sell-out tickets from a scalper, paying through the nose for them, and the seats were for this Friday night, February 21. Moreover, there was a big Washington’s Birthday party scheduled at the McGruders’ for Saturday night, and a Rutledge painter named Mark Hopwell was opening a one-man exhibit at the Silvermine Guild that Sunday afternoon.

Connie was willing to forsake the New Canaan opening — although she really was interested in Hopwell’s work — but she damn well wasn’t ready to give up either the Broadway tickets or the big Saturday night bash. Their argument about Lissie’s detention and Jamie’s determination to “make it easier for her” took place on the Monday after their initial visit to school. Junie Landers had just called, asking where they wanted to eat in the city that Friday night, and Connie had told her she’d discuss it with Jamie and get back to her. Jamie, who had completely forgotten about the theater tickets, immediately said, “Well, what about Lissie?”

“What about her?” Connie said.

“We promised we’d go up there this weekend.”

“Well, we can’t,” Connie said simply. “We have theater tickets.”

“Then what’s she supposed to do up there all by herself?”

“Stop it, Jamie, she won’t be ‘all by herself.’ And besides, if she’s been acting up, she deserves the damn punishment.”

“You sound like Holtzer.”

“Are you so sure she wasn’t smoking pot?”

“I’m positive.”

“Because I’m not.”

“She told me she wasn’t, and I believe her.”

“But she was causing a lot of trouble in the dorm.”

“Kid stuff. Pranks.”

“Pranks, fine. You go see her this weekend. I’m going to see Hadrian VII , and I’m going to the McGruder party on Saturday night.”

“Where maybe Alistair York can dance with his hand on your ass.”

“Yes, maybe. Better his hand than nobody’s.”

“Maybe you can even ask him to join you and the Landerses at the theater this Friday.”

“Good idea. And maybe he’d like to take me to Silvermine on Sunday, while you’re up there in Shitsville holding your daughter’s hand.”

“I thought she was your daughter, too.”

“Jamie, you’re being utterly ridiculous about this,” Connie said. “If you want my opinion, the restriction...”

“I’m only trying to...”

“... will do her a lot of...”

“... make it easier for...”

They stopped talking simultaneously. They looked at each other. “So?” Connie said.

“So I’m going up to see her.”

“Without me,” she said flatly.

“Fine, without you,” he said.

He drove up to the school on Friday at six, an hour after Connie was picked up by the Landerses and not Alistair York but a woman named Alice Keyes, whose dentist husband had abandoned her for his nineteen-year-old receptionist two weeks before Christmas. As the Landerses’ Jaguar pulled out of their driveway, Jamie could see Connie and Alice sitting stiffly beside each other on the back seat, looking for all the world like a pair of bereaved widows. With Holtzer’s blessing, he took Lissie to dinner that night in a restaurant called the Yankee Stonecutter, and later fell asleep watching the eleven o’clock news on New Haven’s Channel 8. The headline story was about the explosion of a terrorist bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. He awakened at 2:00 A.M., surprised to find himself in bed alone, the television still on, a vampire movie unreeling in black and white. He went to the bathroom to pee, got back into bed, watched the movie for another ten minutes, and then switched off the set and the bedlamp.

On Saturday, he ate breakfast alone at the motel, and then picked Lissie up at ten-fifteen. They spent the morning together antiquing, and had a truly superb lunch at a seafood restaurant just outside Wallingford. He was, he admitted to himself, beginning to enjoy Lissie’s Intermediate Discipline. Moreover, he suspected she was enjoying it as much as he. And whereas he knew his excursions to Shottsville weren’t accomplishing what Jonathan Holtzer and the Henderson School expected them to accomplish, he doubted the school’s trustees would have frowned upon the strengthening of ties between a father and his daughter. Electra aside (you insidious bastard, Lipscombe), he discovered his daughter as a young lady that weekend, a discovery tantamount in importance to his first glimpse of her at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on the morning of December 19, 1951.

There was, in Lissie at seventeen, something comfortably reminiscent of Connie at eighteen — which was when he’d met her and fallen in love with her. The same good looks were there, of course, transmitted by those strong Harding genes, her mother’s nose and cheeks, her mother’s flaxen hair, the same lithe slender body, the physical twinship almost complete save for Lissie’s poverty-stricken bust and the fact that her eyes were blue whereas Connie’s were green. But there was more of Connie there as well: Lissie’s outspoken frankness, her obstinate refusal to accept sham of any kind, her fierce pride, her sense of justice, and an innocence he found spookily like her mother’s had been.

She had come into his life in October of 1949, a long-legged, full-breasted eighteen-year-old Vassar girl whose reputation as a Snow Queen had preceded her via the Yale grapevine. It was this about her that had attracted him most, perhaps, her reputed inaccessibility, an aloof manner his mother would have called “stuck-up,” the knowledge that any of the boys who’d dated her (the Yalies, at least) hadn’t got to first base. Jamie had just turned twenty-three that July, and he considered himself a man of the world. He had been discharged from the United States Army in June of 1946, and had bummed around all summer long, going to the beach on good days and the movies on bad ones, and finally entering Yale in the fall. In 1949, when he first spotted Connie at the Vassar mixer, he was a graduating senior and although his roommate — a boy named Maury Atkins — had told him to stay away from Constance Hard-On, also known in the trade as C. T. Harding, Jamie felt he himself might just possibly be the man to crack her icy façade.

“I warned you,” Maury said, and shook his head in sympathy as he watched Jamie cross the floor to where Connie was sitting and talking to a girlfriend. Rock-and-roll had still not exploded on the scene; the song the record player was oozing as Jamie crossed the floor was a sweet little number titled “Mona Lisa”; the man singing it was a relatively new recording star named Nat “King” Cole. Fashion that year had just about outgrown the folly of the New Look; it was now possible to see whether a girl had good legs, or in fact any legs at all. As Jamie approached the couch where Connie was sitting with her friend and amiably chatting, he was pleased to notice that she had splendid legs indeed and what one might have termed exuberant boobs protruding perkily in the swooping neck of the green dress she was wearing. Green dress, green shoes, and green eyes, too; she acknowledged his approach with a jungle-glade glance and then turned her attention and her chatter back to her girlfriend, a good-looking brunette who seemed utterly bored with the entire universe.

“Hi,” Jamie said, “would you care to dance?”

“I’d adore it,” Connie said at once, surprising him, and getting to her feet and moving into his arms. He thought surely Maury Atkins had been wrong. She seemed warm and receptive as he asked her all the questions students ask of each other the world over: How do you like Yale, Harvard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Oxford, University of Michigan, Le Sorbonne, C.C.N.Y., the Citadel, all or none of the above; are you a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior or grad student; how do you like your roommate; what is your major, what is your minor, does your mother come from Ireland, and who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?